Introduction

• Each level builds upon the expectations of previous levels
• Engineers should demonstrate consistent performance at their level before promotion
• The framework allows for individual growth paths (individual contributor vs people management tracks)
• Impact and scope increase with each level

What is important to Safety?

• Technical Excellence
• Ownership & Impact
• Leadership & Communication
• Innovation & Problem Solving
• Product & Customer Focus

Individual Contributor Track

• Writes clean, documented code following team standards | - Applies established patterns and practices effectively
• Implements maintainable solutions and meaningful tests | - Demonstrates strong technical judgment and system design capabilities
• Establishes best practices and improves code quality standards | - Architects complex systems and makes sound technical trade-offs
• Drives engineering excellence initiatives across multiple teams | - Provides technical vision and influences architectural decisions across teams
• Defines and evolves engineering standards at organization level | - Drives technical strategy and innovation at company level
• Shapes technical excellence culture company-wide | - Shapes technical direction of the industry through pioneering innovations and thought leadership | | Ownership & Impact | - Owns small, well-defined tasks
• Delivers assigned tasks that contribute to team goals | - Owns features end-to-end
• Understands and considers business impact in technical decisions | - Owns medium-sized projects and their outcomes
• Proactively identifies and delivers high-impact work | - Owns major initiatives across multiple teams
• Drives initiatives that significantly impact business metrics | - Owns critical company-wide technical initiatives
• Influences product strategy through technical leadership | - Owns strategic technical direction of the company
• Shapes company strategy and creates new business opportunities | - Creates new technical paradigms that open unprecedented business opportunities | | Leadership & Communication | - Seeks and acts on feedback effectively
• Clearly communicates status and asks for help when needed | - Begins mentoring new team members
• Effectively collaborates within immediate team | - Actively mentors engineers and leads by example
• Facilitates technical discussions and cross-team collaboration | - Develops senior engineers and improves team processes
• Drives alignment across multiple teams and stakeholders- | - Grows technical leaders and shapes team culture
• Influences organization-wide technical decisions | - Develops next generation of technical leadership
• Represents company technically to external audience | - Builds and influences the next generation of technical leaders across the industry | | Innovation & Problem Solving | - Learns and applies existing solutions
• Solves well-scoped problems with guidance | - Suggests improvements to existing systems
• Independently solves moderate technical challenges | - Designs innovative solutions to complex problems
• Resolves complex technical issues with minimal guidance | - Drives adoption of new technologies and approaches
• Makes high-quality decisions with broad impact | - Pioneers new technical directions and architectures
• Tackles ambiguous problems with organization-wide impact | - Sets technical vision and drives industry-leading innovation
• Makes strategic decisions affecting company's future | - Makes decisions that influence the long-term technical trajectory of both company and industry | | Product & Customer Focus | - Learns basic product context and user needs
• Understands basic user requirements | - Understands product goals and user impact
• Considers user experience in technical decisions | - Influences product decisions through technical insight
• Advocates for customer needs in technical solutions | - Shapes product strategy through technical leadership
• Drives technical decisions based on customer impact | - Drives product vision through technical innovation
• Shapes technical strategy around customer needs | - Defines technical strategy aligned with product vision
• Influences company direction based on market needs | - Envisions and enables transformative solutions to customer problems at an industry scale |

People Management Track

• Enables team's technical growth by identifying risks and quality issues | TBD | TBD | TBD | | Ownership & Impact | | | | - Owns team-level delivery
• Drives team effectiveness through process improvements and balanced priority management | | | | | Leadership & Communication | | | | - Acts as the team's technical leader by facilitating technical discussions, partnering with Product on planning
• Drives team growth through mentoring, feedback | | | | | Innovation & Problem Solving | | | | - Guides team decision-making and conflict resolution while enabling autonomous problem-solving
• Balances process improvements and innovation with team stability and effectiveness | | | | | Product & Customer Focus | | | | - Partners with Product to translate business goals into technical direction
• Ensures team maintains focus on product quality and customer needs | | | |

Data Leadership Track

• Drives adoption of best practices for data engineering and cloud security within the team | - Defines data architecture standards and cloud infrastructure patterns across multiple teams
• Establishes data quality frameworks and monitoring strategies for Safety's intelligence systems | - Architects and oversees data processing pipelines and cloud infrastructure that power Safety's vulnerability detection and analysis
• Drives adoption of modern data platforms and processing frameworks that handle Safety's growing security intelligence needs | - Establishes data governance standards and cloud architecture patterns that ensure scalability and reliability across all data systems | | Ownership & Impact | | | | - Owns team-level data infrastructure delivery and pipeline reliability
• Drives improvements in data processing speed and accuracy that directly impact threat detection capabilities | - Owns critical data infrastructure initiatives that span multiple engineering teams
• Manages data platform roadmap and ensures alignment with Safety's strategic objectives | - Owns the strategic direction of Safety's data infrastructure and analytics capabilities
• Delivers data solutions that directly improve threat detection accuracy and processing speed | - Controls budget and resource allocation for data engineering and cloud architecture initiatives | | Leadership & Communication | | | | - Leads technical discussions on data architecture and processing strategies
• Facilitates collaboration between data team and security researchers to align on data requirements | - Influences organization-wide decisions on data strategy and infrastructure investments
• Develops data engineering talent and builds team capabilities in cloud technologies | - Builds and mentors teams of data engineers, analysts, and cloud architects
• Partners with Product and Security teams to translate vulnerability intelligence needs into scalable data solutions
• Aligns data strategy with Safety's mission to protect the software supply chain | | | Innovation & Problem Solving | | | | - Guides team through complex data modeling and processing challenges
• Identifies opportunities to improve data pipeline efficiency and reduce processing latency | - Pioneers new approaches to processing and analyzing software supply chain security data
• Tackles ambiguous problems around scaling data systems for growing vulnerability databases | - Pioneers new approaches to processing and analyzing security vulnerability data at scale
• Designs cloud-native architectures that handle massive volumes of package and dependency data
• Solves complex challenges around real-time threat detection and data pipeline reliability | | | Product & Customer Focus | | | | - Partners with Product to translate security intelligence needs into data requirements
• Maintains focus on data accuracy and completeness for customer-facing security alerts | - Shapes product strategy through data-driven insights and analytics capabilities
• Ensures data infrastructure scales to meet customer demands for real-time security intelligence | - Ensures data systems deliver actionable security insights that customers can trust
• Collaborates with customers to understand their security data needs and compliance requirements
• Drives data initiatives that enhance Safety's ability to identify and prevent s | |